Marketing Strategies for Small Business is an Enigma

Marketing strategies for small business an enigma. It is no different than medicine. Any who claims to have a proven ANYTHING, is lying!

Just as in medicine there are millions of variables and every doctor is no more than a student using you as their training subject. Thus, ONE reason the medical industry is making such a hard push to track EVERYTHING about EVERY patient and make it accessible to EVERY doctor. (Let’s not start a war about all the other reasons they want to track every single thing about you, that’s a different topic). I have been reading marketing threads for a couple hours now and I’m seeing a recurring theme.

There is so much discussion about medium, message, geography, some about demographics and I think out of around 100 posts I’ve seen only a couple that touched on perhaps the most important topics of marketing strategies for small business of frequency, timing and penetration.

 

Frequency, Timing and Penetration

Even the worst advert in the world can get a VERY good response rate if it follows the “unspoken” rules that it seems are often overlooked.

Marketing strategies for small business could involve using river rocks scribbled on with Sharpie marker for marketing and get incredible results if you harness the power of frequency, timing and penetration.

In a world of “GIVE IT TO ME NOW AND WITH LITTLE EFFORT” everyone has become blind to how marketing has worked will always work. You want instant results. You want tons of money from one campaign. It is never going to happen! It’s the illusion of success if this happens once, but it is VERY unlikely it will happen twice.

GEICO does not use ONE brilliant ad 4 times a year to get new customers. They run 100,000 stupid ads a day on every conceivable medium where people can be found. Penetration! Frequency!

Can you afford this? NO!

But can you afford to market to 1000 homes within 1 mile of your home or your office, twice a month, every month, for 3 straight years and “OWN” that neighborhood for marketing purposes? YES!

 

Fish Smarter, Not Harder

How many jobs can one truck serve in a year? Depending on your model, perhaps 400? 1000? What if you could drive 1 minute between jobs? What if you could drive 5 minutes from your home or office to your job and home for lunch? Most O/O or even small companies CANNOT possibly serve 10,000 or 100,000 customers in a year. You tell yourself “It’s all about the numbers”. That’s the same as a fisherman saying, I’m gonna catch fish by casting the biggest possible net EVER because I DEMAND BIG NETS! If the same fishermen KNEW that fish where in that area AND they would eventually be hungry enough to nibble on his bait, if he were to “OWN” that spot, and have the right bait, on the hook, in the water, all the time, especially when the right fish where hungry, he might catch a few here and there, but when the timing was right, he’d already be in place for the mother load. Granted his bait might only fit a single fish, THE fish he wants to catch, and a few other fish he isn’t fond of might get caught on his lures, in the end, by owning that spot, with the right bait, he WILL catch fish and over time he will have success. If he dances around, fishing EVERY hole where someone once caught a fish, he’ll burn up all his fuel, lose a lot of bait and end up ashamed and broke with no fish to show for his investments.

 

Marketing Strategies for Small Business Lesson Summary

  1. Know where your fish are (geographic area)
  2. Know how to catch them (bait, demographics and psychographics)
  3. Know when your fish are hungry (timing)
  4. Never stop fishing (frequency and penetration)

Just remember: Marketing strategies for small business is like fishing and if you always caught something, they would call it catching, not fishing.

Photography Credit: JLH3Photography